Category Archives: How about that?

Space images can often be breathtaking and the night sky has often inspired artists to produce incredible masterpieces. Sometimes even the way astronomers represent data can be both scientifically and artistically stunning. Case in point is the polarization map released by the Planck Collaboration, which

If you wonder where we came from and how we got here, there’s a step we are quite confident on. About 5 billions of years ago, before the Sun shone a single ray all the atoms you are made of were part of a large

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope photograph is one of my favourite images of interacting galaxies, but it’s actually a bit of a cheat. The galaxies are not interacting at all. The galaxies are simply in a chance alignment from our vantage point, and that’s how

There has been a surprising affinity between astronomy and music. Both needed the inspiration of the muses to be performed in Ancient Greece, and expressions like the Music of the Spheres just shows the profound link between these two realms of human genius. In space,

Is the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way going to eat the Earth? Ross, UK No, the Earth is not in any danger from the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the centre of the Milky Way. The SMBH, known as Sagittarius A*,

In a previous post, we discussed the groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves and it’s importance for science as a whole. Now LIGO has observed another detection, and it has the incredible feature of being the first direct observation of a spinning black hole. The merging

Spacesuits are a fundamental tool for keeping astronauts safe in space, but the protection they supply is often mistaken, exaggerated or romanticised in science fiction. Spacesuits are garments worn by astronauts to survive the harsh conditions of outer space. They should be thought of